Ruka, the tomboy inventor of Noelle's family, has invented a flying device that works on internally generated gases. Unfortunately, she learns, to produce an adequate supply of fuel, you have to eat large amounts of yakiimos, or roasted sweet potatoes, which like baked beans are noted for producing flatulence. [Ruka is certainly onto something here: Tsou and Yang, in their definitive ISHS Acta Horticulturae study Flatulence Factors in Sweet Potato, found that feeding sweet potato starch to laboratory rats did indeed lead to significant production of gases that would be theoretically useful as alternative clean energy sources.] In so doing, Ruka comes into conflict with Eros, Silky's infatuated minion, who has gotten the idea that he will win his mistress's heart by obtaining large quantities of the same treat for her.

From this unlikely premise comes Step 19 (Power of Love), one of the great Tennimon episodes. By chance I've gotten an unusually large number of sketch sets from this plot, which are easier to appreciate when they're put together, alongside the cels I've been able to nab. Some of these are hidden to keep this gallery to one page, so go to "Private Area" and enter the password "seemorestuff" if you want more.

Tennimon is a bit like Forrest Gump’s mother’s box of chocolates, full of surprising guest turns from important anime figures on their way up in the industry. In this case, the script was courtesy of Michiko Yokote, a promising writer with credits for work in Ranma ½, Rurouni Kenshin, and Cowboy Bebop and at the time busy producing scripts for Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne. She was also one of the pair of scriptwriters responsible for the Ah My Goddess Movie .

After scripting Tennimon’s Ep. 19 (along with that for Ep. 20, “Close Dream, Far Person,” another TnN classic) she moved on to more serious assignments as overall script supervisor, determining the overall course of a series and outlining all the episodes in advance. (This job is officially credited as “series composition.”) The list of series storylines Yokote helped create includes several classics, including Gravitation, Princess Tutu, Genshiken, xxxHOLiC, Kobato, and Squid Girl. Yokote most recently won a Kobe Animation award in 2016 for the screenplay for Shirobako.

The episode was directed by Tsuneo Kobayashi, a Pierrot figure on the rise who was soon to gain prominence as the overall director for Twelve Kingdoms/Juuni Kokki, Midori Days, and Emma: A Victorian Romance . He also did storyboarding for both NieA_7 and Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee.

By contrast, the animation director of this episode, whose name seems to transliterate to “Nobuhiko Kobayashi,” is something of a mystery. The Japanese anime wiki, usually a comprehensive source for tracking down the careers of artists, lists only this single assignment. There is a well-known Japanese writer/columnist by that name, but that person does not have an anime connection. Perhaps a pseudonym for an artist contracted to another studio who did not want to be credited by name? A Nobuhiko Kobayashi is, however, credited in various ways for a series of video games by Bandai and Capcom, many of which (like the 1999 Neon Genesis Evangelion game) were spin-offs from anime series. So it’s also possible that this artist quickly departed anime for a closely related industry.